Gateway to Jihad

Pakistan’s Phantom Border

Pakistan is often called the most dangerous country on earth. Increasingly, its people would agree. Despite nearly $6 billion in U.S. military aid for the border region since 9/11, the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and homegrown terrorist groups have eroded the border with Afghanistan, inflicting a steady toll of suicide bombings. Going where few Westerners dare—from Taliban strongholds to undercover-police headquarters—the author sees what’s tearing the country apart.

The gate at the Chaman crossing is one of nearly 1,000 posts on the Afghan-Pakistani border. At night, the border is largely unguarded, allowing Taliban fighters, weapons, and drugs to pass through. Photographs by Alex Majoli.

It has been more than 60 years since Pakistan was carved out of India by the British as a moderate, Muslim nation, a refuge rather than an Islamic state. For most of those six decades, Pakistan has been a friend of America’s. Since 9/11, it has been a so-called partner in the war on terror.

Up to a point. Newsweek recently called Pakistan arguably the most dangerous country on earth, harboring as it does a lethal combination of mostly foreign-born al-Qaeda terrorists and a native-born Taliban movement that is supported by its Taliban brethren across the border in Afghanistan. (American intelligence calls them “Big T” and “Little T.”) Given that the border is ridiculously porous and difficult to patrol, Pakistan has become a kind of haven for potential terrorists eager to be set loose into the wider world.

Pakistan’s border trouble is concentrated in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, a mountainous, semi-autonomous no-man’s-land that abuts Afghanistan, is home to three million people, and is off limits to foreigners and to most Pakistanis. (This is the rugged area where many believe Osama bin Laden is hiding.) Since 9/11, America has pumped in nearly $6 billion to aid the country’s military in catching terrorists who operate out of the Tribal Areas and other border regions, but so far, at least from Washington’s vantage point, there hasn’t been much return on the investment. A scathing report by the Government Accountability Office, released in April, noted that there is still “no comprehensive plan for meeting U.S. national-security goals” in the Tribal Areas.

On the ground in Pakistan’s border regions—where the recently elected Pakistani government has further angered the U.S. by negotiating truces with militants—things look far worse.

The Teacher and the Bomb Under the Chair

In the seven years since I last worked in Pakistan, the cities that I once knew have changed drastically. Aside from the Tribal Areas, there are entire regions of the country that are off limits to Westerners, taken over by the Taliban. In my hotel in Peshawar, a polluted and paranoid garrison town six miles from the Tribal Areas, I find an old guidebook mentioning a nearby village: “Darra Adam Khael is the largest centre of indigenous arms manufacture In Darra village, almost every house is a gun factory, fabricating astonishing copies of all major types of guns with the crudest of tools.”

The village is no longer a tourist attraction. It’s under Taliban control, part of a process that locals refer to as the “Talibanization” of Pakistan. The border between Afghanistan and Pakistan is shifting, moving farther into Pakistan.

Peshawar itself is trending this way. The city is the capital of the North-West Frontier Province (N.W.F.P.), which borders the Tribal Areas and is now thought of as a front line in the war on terror. The Peshawar hotel, where I stayed in 2001 and which was once overbooked with foreign reporters, diplomats, and aid workers, is now nearly empty. Back in 2001, Peshawar was dangerous, a place where you could buy heroin or smuggle guns, but now it feels like a war zone. It’s well known that the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and other jihadist groups pour out of the Tribal Areas and regroup here.

Out on the streets, where I receive hostile stares, I see no foreigners in the markets. The video shops are either closed down or show signs of having survived bombings. The Bollywood-style cinemas I remember are gone. The women are covered in burkas like they are in Kabul.

In the bazaars, I notice, there are almost no women. Nor are there billboards of women, advertising face cream or shampoo, as in Lahore and Islamabad. A ban on women in advertisements apparently exists all across the N.W.F.P. Militants have set fire to girls’ schools and also attempted to bomb them, simply because they exist.

The division between militant and moderate Muslims has been growing throughout Pakistan. The police say suicide-bomber attacks in the country occurred at least once a week last year. The military, who are meant to be fighting the militants, and the police are most targeted, but last December a suicide bomber was part of the attack that killed Benazir Bhutto, the two-time prime minister who America (perhaps naïvely) was hoping could take control of the country and clean out the Tribal Areas. The jihadists that launch suicide bombings often belong to small cells that spring up rapidly but are usually linked to bigger organizations or leaders in the Tribal Areas, where there is no problem getting weapons or volunteers. Meanwhile, average Pakistanis in devastated cities like Peshawar can’t understand why they are getting blown up simply because America is fighting a proxy war here.

“It’s a little bit like a city under siege,” says one video-store owner who has survived several bombings of his shops on Lahore Road, the DVD hub of Peshawar. The man continues to sell videos (mainly a mix of Western and local action films) despite the fact that he gets night letters from the extremists—“sometimes twice a week, sometimes twice a month”—telling him to stop operating.

A Pakistani friend relays a story about a child who came home from her Peshawar school recently and said she wanted to plant a bomb under her teacher’s chair because she did not like her. The girl’s father was shocked. “Where would she have learned such a thing?” he asked in a horrified tone. “From being exposed to the constant bombings here,” my friend said.

“They Are Everywhere”

In a grimy office on a backstreet in Peshawar, I meet a Pakistani reporter from the Tribal Areas who has strong links with the Taliban (and doesn’t want me to use his name). He offers tea and asks if I want to watch a video of a Pakistani informer getting beheaded. (No thanks.) He is facilitating a meeting for me with a Taliban commander and gets on his two cell phones trying to reach the man who, it turns out, is having “security” problems in coming to meet us. He is stuck in traffic on the way to Kohat, a garrison town in the N.W.F.P., because the Pakistani Army is conducting a raid.

The journalist, like many people inside and outside Pakistan, sees the roots of the conflict in the Cold War, when the U.S. aided the Afghan mujahideen in fighting the Soviets. “People blame America for bringing their war to our land,” he says vehemently. “Tribal people had no idea about jihad before that.”

The people he is referring to are primarily Pashtun tribesmen. The Tribal Areas, originally delineated by the British as a buffer between the Raj and the Russian Empire, operate today under an ancient set of laws known as Pashtunwali, the Pashtun code of honor. The Pashtuns, who also make up a significant portion of Afghanistan’s population, have always been bound on either side of the border by fierce cultural, emotional, and social ties. As one Pashtun saying goes: “Me against my brother, my brother and me against our cousins, and we and our cousins against the enemy.” (The same expression is also used by Palestinians.)

A DVD shop on Lahore Road, in Peshawar. “It’s a little bit like a city under siege,” says one video-store owner, referring to the frequent bombings, which have destroyed many shops.

Here, people protect their own. For the most part, honor prohibits one Pashtun from fighting or killing another. Further complicating the war against the extremists is the fact that soldiers of the Frontier Corps, the federal paramilitary force that has taken the brunt of the fight against the Taliban, are usually from the same Pashtun tribe as the men they are trying to catch. (Major General Athar Abbas of the Pakistani Army will later confirm the complexity of waging a war between Pashtun brethren: “We are not Israel and Palestine,” he says. “We are operating against our own people.”)

The Taliban commander stuck in traffic never makes it to the journalist’s office. At midnight, back at my hotel, I get a text message from a friend in Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan, another Pakistani province bordering the Tribal Areas. Quetta was once called “Taliban HQ” by General James Jones, then nato supreme commander, in testimony before the U.S. Senate. I had written my friend for help in finding Taliban to interview in Quetta.

“they are everywhere,” he texts back.

“And Then I Saw a Spark”

‘The army has got to go,” sighs Toseef, the son of an important political figure from the Awami National Party (A.N.P.), as we drive north out of Peshawar into the shadow of the mountains where the Tribal Areas begin.

It’s early on a Sunday morning and we’re headed toward Nahqi, a village in the Charsadda District, right on the border of the Tribal Areas. We cross checkpoints and the Kabul River, known locally as the Sardaryab. Men push leaky green, yellow, and red wooden boats out to fish.

Toseef is a young reporter, and he is helping me because he knows the area. He’s talking about how little the army has been doing to crack down on terrorist activity inside the Tribal Areas. Another member of our party mentions casually that even President Musharraf has been heard to say that the army uses only 20 percent of its potential trying to catch terrorists in the region, so impossible is the task.

It’s not just the tribal and religious issues. The terrain is hard, the warfare difficult. There are mountains in the Tribal Areas more than 15,000 feet high, impasses of snow and deep rivers, and treacherous gorges. Roads and communications infrastructure are not well developed. The border with Afghanistan alone is more than 1,500 miles long (or roughly three-fourths the length of the U.S.-Mexican border). In many places this border is only theoretical.

“Even if you sent a surveyor there, he would have trouble seeing which side is Pakistan and which is Afghanistan,” a Pakistani Army officer tells me.

But as we drive toward Nahqi, in the shadow of the mountains, the landscape is bucolic, rural, quiet. The paranoia of Peshawar seems far away. People drive oxcarts, children fly kites, and merchants sell cauliflower, onions, and turnips at open-air markets. But I notice it is men who are picking through the piles of oranges and buying bunches of mint: I don’t see any women shopping for food.

Inside the car, I cover my head with a hijab.

We’re now less than a mile from the border of the Tribal Areas, and our driver is getting a little twitchy. He says, in Pashto, that he wants to take another road on the way home, that on this one we’re at risk of being kidnapped.

In the village, Syed Masoom Shah, a local A.N.P. leader, greets me at his home, complete with his own heavily armed security detail. He has it for good reason: the A.N.P. is a secular Pashtun party that has supported the fight against the Taliban (though the A.N.P. has recently started backdoor negotiations with militants as a means to secure votes).

We sit with Syed under a mango tree on a makeshift wooden bed drinking sugary tea. Seemingly an entire village’s worth of people—all men—emerge and stare at me unabashed.

Syed tells me to take off my headscarf: “You are not a Muslim. They will stare at you more with the scarf.”

Syed survived a recent bombing attack that took place at the local hujra, a traditional Pashtun gathering point, during a political rally a few weeks back. At least 30 people were killed, and more than 100 seriously injured. He came away with only cuts and abrasions. He believes the police were behind it—the police backed by jihadists.

I ask if the police in this area are sympathetic to the Taliban. “Of course,” he says, surprised I even asked.

We drive to the place where Syed was standing when the bomb went off, and the police are already there. Someone has tipped them off that Westerners arrived in the village, and our driver grows even more nervous, shifting from foot to foot. The roof and walls of the building where the bomb exploded are caved in, exposing bricks and electrical wires.

“A young boy was reciting the Holy Koran, and then I saw a spark,” recalls Syed. “I am in politics, so I am insecure, but everyone who lives in Pakistan is insecure.”

In many of the small tribal-belt towns that have been infiltrated by the Taliban, local officials, known as maliks, have been compromised. I ask if this area has been Talibanized, and Syed’s uncle, a former banker named Sayed Bashir Ahmad, replies that his family has lived here for 600 years and he has certainly seen the changes of the past decade.

“What happened is that young boys came from the tribal belt looking for agricultural work,” he says. “And when they could not find it, they went to the madrassas.” At the madrassas, he says, they were converted to radical extremism, and then many of them went on to fight against nato in Afghanistan.

Someone else in the crowd adds that the populace in the area is heavily armed: “American arms came through this area during the Russian war. So much Kalashnikovs, and now they are still here. The Afghan war is the main culprit—people have been trained and armed by America.”

“People Like My Son Pay the Price”

The next morning, back in Peshawar, I visit the local hospital—a colonial-era building called Lady Reading Hospital, named after a long-dead English aristocrat and do-gooder—and climb several flights of dirty stairs to the thoracic ward. It’s a decrepit place, with intermittent electricity and crowded rooms where patients lie helpless in bloody beds, their relatives nearby filling water bottles. There is a stink of urine. I don’t see many doctors.

Bombing victims are scattered throughout the hospital, with special signs over their beds reading “B.B.I.”—bomb-blast incident. Most of them are poor, from the Tribal Areas or villages near Peshawar, and were simply at the wrong place at the wrong time. Their relatives tell me explicit stories—this one was at the market buying mint when it happened, this one was at a political rally—and point out the amputations, the shrapnel-filled bodies.

A young boy, wounded in a suicide attack near the border of the Tribal Areas, lies in a Peshawar hospital, recovering from the amputation of his left arm.

“There were 58 people killed and 150 seriously wounded,” says one man, who asked not to be identified (“We are all frightened in the tribal belt now”), standing over the bed of his 16-year-old son, who is most likely going to have his right leg amputated. In fact, this father is a doctor, so he knew enough to get his son helicoptered out of the Tribal Areas to Peshawar.

But he is nearly weeping as he cleans up his son’s wound and says to me, “For 25 years, we have been involved in terrorism that is not our own fault. It’s the geographical location.” Please leave us in peace, he seems to say. It’s not our fault that our land is so contested.

Elsewhere, Syed Zamir Hasan stands near his 22-year-old son, Syed Ashad, who has shrapnel wounds in his chest from another bombing in a different part of the tribal belt. The father has no idea who was responsible. He moves his son’s arm and makes him expose the bloody wound. The son grimaces in pain.

“People give shelter to the Taliban. That’s all they do,” the father explains. “Because they are afraid. Because of that, they get bombed.” But who is behind the attacks, the military or the jihadists? The man smiles, confused.

The brother of a young bomb victim grabs my hand—strange for a Pashtun to touch a woman, but his face is emphatic.

“We are not interested in who is doing it,” he says. “We just want it to be stopped. Even if the West comes to stop it.”

Before I leave, the doctor father catches up with me. He is tearful. He tries to explain that people living in the Tribal Areas often have to support the Taliban, even if that is not their choice and they don’t agree with their methods.

“But then they de-stabilize our dear and beautiful country. And people like my son pay the price for it.”

“Long Live the Taliban”

On a plane ride to Quetta, a city in arid Baluchistan Province inhabited by more than 850,000 people—including a number of high-level Taliban leaders who live comfortably with their families in the suburbs—I see British military types doing their best to be incognito. It’s impossible: their buzz cuts, their sunglasses, even their reading material—paperbacks by Mary Higgins Clark—give them away among the turbaned and solemn Pakistanis on board.

Quetta, south of the Tribal Areas and about 75 miles from the Afghan border, is a strange, surreal, claustrophobic place, usually off limits to Westerners for fear of kidnappings. Journalists rarely get visas to visit Quetta. Foreign aid organizations don’t operate out here unless they use local staff. This is another place where the Taliban come to rest and recuperate, to receive hospital treatment, to regroup, to get money and arms, to eat, and to pray, before heading back to the tribal belt or Afghanistan to wage more jihad.

At an intersection on the drive into town, I am baffled by a billboard apparently put up by the Afghan government. It depicts two swarthy men in turbans embracing each other. we are one people, it reads. we don’t divide ourselves into taliban and non-taliban. we are all afghani. For a moment, I have to remind myself that I am in Pakistan and not in an Afghan city such as Kandahar or Jalalabad. But being in Quetta is a bit like being in Laredo: you know you are technically in America, but you might as well be in Mexico. It’s as if the border had been erased and no one told you.

Drugs pour into Quetta—the city is famous for its potent hashish, which you can buy at roadside stands—as do illegal Afghan workers headed ultimately for Iran and then Europe, desperate for a better life and more money. In neighborhoods such as Pashtunabad, with its narrow alleys and high mud-brick walls, there are plenty of Taliban leaders and their families living safely and comfortably—probably, my driver hints, with some kind of support from local authorities. It is barely more than two hours by road to Kandahar, the southern Afghan city that is a center of Taliban activity.

I am taken to a walled safe house, clean and white and discreet, with a garden and a photograph of the cricketer turned politician Imran Khan on an office wall. You can’t see the house from the road, and my bedroom windows have fortifications. An armed guard prowls the grounds.

For protection, we have our own private guard, a police officer from the Tribal Areas named Rahim. He is silent but has an AK-47 slung round his shoulder. Our Pashtun driver is a local businessman who knows everyone and carries a small automatic weapon from the Czech Republic; there’s also a spare gun in the glove compartment in case we get into a tight situation.

Our S.U.V. has sinister blacked-out windows so that we can see out but no one can see in. It’s disconcerting to be driving through the claustrophobic alleys of Pashtunabad and suddenly be a few inches from a Taliban fighter, who stares into the window but cannot see anything.

“If they smell a foreigner, they will slaughter you,” the driver says several times. I am not sure whether he is joking or not, but Taliban sympathies are openly displayed in Quetta: the black-and-white flags of the Jamiat-Ulema-e-Islam (J.U.I.), the religious party that dominates this province, are everywhere. (It is widely believed—and alleged by some officials—that religious parties provide jihadists with recruits and personnel.) In Kharotabad, another generally off-limits, hard-core Taliban suburb, the wall of a mosque is spray-painted with the words long live the taliban.

Beyond such sympathies, it is difficult to get concrete evidence of local collaboration with jihadists—fear is everywhere—but people say they have relatives who have gone to fight in Afghanistan, and many local people have disappeared, thought to have been taken away to Guantánamo. Last year, The New York Times reported, to the great annoyance of the Pakistani government, that Pakistani authorities were encouraging the insurgencies here in Quetta, if not sponsoring them. According to the Times, a Taliban commander claims he was jailed by Pakistani intelligence for refusing to fight in Afghanistan. A Western diplomat in Kabul told the paper he had seen intelligence reports of a meeting near the Afghan border of a senior Taliban commander and a retired colonel from Pakistan’s intelligence agency.

The local officials I speak to insist this isn’t the case. “We are partners in the war on terror here,” says Mohammed Akbar Baluch, the chief of the Federal Investigation Agency (F.I.A.) in Quetta. “Whenever we catch [terrorists], we send them to Guantánamo Bay.”

But he adds, grumpily, “America created this jihad. Then they left and we are facing the consequences.” Baluch also says the job of catching jihadists crossing the border is virtually impossible. If America, with all its money and technology, can’t control its Mexican border, how can the Pakistanis police their far more geographically difficult border with Afghanistan? Still, Baluch swears that for the past six years he has not seen a jihadist. He opens his jail cell and shows me dozens of Afghans he has caught crossing the border illegally—most of them look to me like itinerant laborers rather than Taliban.

Obviously, jihadists do get across. At Quetta’s al-Khidmet Hospital, founded with Kuwaiti money during the Afghan-Soviet war, I see several recovering Taliban fighters. The hospital specializes in prosthetic devices for land-mine and other war-related injuries, and patients come from all over Afghanistan. The chief surgeon, Dr. Ata ur Rehman, who has been treating the war wounded since 1979, gives me a tour of the wards and insists that all patients must come with papers from the Afghan government and register with Pakistani intelligence.

But as we talk to the many wounded men, my driver quietly indicates who is a Taliban fighter and who is an ordinary patient. We do it with code: Is he a patient? And the driver shakes his head to indicate that, no, he is not an ordinary patient. Most of the men I talk to, according to the driver, are not real patients. (He tells me later that he could pick out the fighters by their accents and demeanors. A few even confessed their allegiances while the doctor and I were off talking to others.)

When I ask why they are there, all the fighters say the same thing: they have been injured in motorcycle accidents in Afghanistan. But when I study one of the men’s X-rays, I see shrapnel embedded inside his hands, and another appears to have a bullet wound.

“It’s glass,” a man says when he sees me staring at his shrapnel on the X-ray. (It’s true that glass would also show up on an X-ray.) He then goes into a long, implausible story about how he was in a car crash.

The next man has a shattered leg—another motorcycle crash. Nearby is someone with a chest wound. When he thinks we are out of earshot, the doctor asks one of the men if he has been shot. Later, another of the fighter-patients, who lost part of his leg, chases our photographer down the hallway on his crutches, angrily demanding he find the fighter a prosthetic leg from America.

The Zealots

Late one afternoon, we are granted a rare visit with Maulvi Noor Mohammed, once a J.U.I. representative from Baluchistan to the National Assembly and an important religious leader who supports the Taliban.

When we enter the small, carpeted room at the side of his mosque, after he has said the dusk prayers, Noor Mohammed points to a place on the floor for me to sit. He is barefoot and clothed in a white blanket edged with green. He does not make eye contact with me.

I can sense the shock of the other turbaned men in the room to find themselves crowded in a small space with a female. Two or three rock back and forth, holding copies of the Koran, not unlike fervent Jews at the Western Wall. Their eyes are glazed; they appear to me to be either stoned by Quetta’s potent hashish or simply addled by religious zeal.

My driver told me Noor Mohammed has been investigated many times by Pakistani intelligence for allegedly aiding the Taliban. He recently said on the record that the J.U.I. gives only “moral” support, praying for the Taliban’s “success in ousting foreign troops from the land of Afghanistan.” To me, he speaks heatedly of the need for worldwide Islam. It’s the only way humankind can live peacefully, he says.

His son, who has that glazed, stoned, otherworldly look, serves sweet green tea from a tin kettle as his father explains that he has nothing against Christians and “people of the Book,” as he refers to Jews, as long as they all “live according to our laws, our Shari’a, or the option is the sword.” After all, he explains, George W. Bush started the crusade against Islam in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Kashmir, and Muslim countries have not invaded America.

“Yet,” someone in the group sniggers, over his cup of tea.

We sit inside the room for more than an hour, until darkness falls and it is time for Noor Mohammed to lead prayers again. Before we part, he tells me he has written letters to Kofi Annan and George Bush suggesting they convert to Islam and “to join all hands in the Muslim world.” He also gives me some news. He does not believe Osama bin Laden was behind 9/11; he believes it was Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, which he says is also behind Pakistan’s plague of suicide bombings. He then asks me if I want to convert to Islam.

“It’s my duty as a Muslim to try to convert you,” he says. I politely refuse, and say I am a believer in my own way.

“You Don’t Need an Argument to Hate America”

The next day we drive toward Zhob, a Taliban stronghold near the border. The road is bumpy and surrounded by the red mountains that abut Afghanistan. We pass empty villages of mud huts built by the Kuchis, the nomads who travel here from Afghanistan during the summer to farm. In between these uninhabited villages, we pass madrassa after madrassa. On the radio, we hear there has been another suicide bombing.

We pass through areas rich in chromite and reach a village, Qila Saifullah, that the driver says is an al-Qaeda stronghold. He is from this area, belongs to the largest clan, and claims this is where British bombers of Pakistani descent met with al-Qaeda’s Ayman al-Zawahiri in 2005 to make their plans for the 7/7 attacks in London. The village feels like the end of the road, with a few turbaned, hostile-looking men milling around and a madrassa with the graffito we will defend our madrassa with the last drop of blood.

My driver gets out and tries to arrange some interviews. We see him gesticulating with a turbaned man who says he will never “speak to foreigners.” The driver climbs back into the car, repeats his standard Quetta line about how “if they smell a foreigner, they will slaughter you,” and then looks nervously behind him, announcing that we are being tailed by a black S.U.V. with tinted windows. “It’s been following us for about an hour,” he says, loosening the latch of the glove compartment, where he stows his gun.

We head back toward Quetta. After an hour, the car behind us turns off the road. The driver relaxes and decides to give us his own two cents on the war on terror: “America is not an ally of Pakistan. It uses Pakistan like toilet paper and flushes it down the toilet when it’s done.” He, like many people here, is not sure where the endless suicide bombings are coming from, but he is sure they are coming from somewhere we least expect: “It’s too easy to say it’s the jihadis. The Secret Service, the government, the C.I.A.—who knows?”

It is nearly sunset when we get back to Quetta, and we head to Pashtunabad. We stop and talk to a group of young Taliban fighters, fresh from fighting near Kandahar, they say, who are walking toward the mosque. They have come to Quetta to rest, to get some peace from the fighting. I ask why they are at war with nato.

The author encountered young Taliban fighters in Quetta. “When I look at history, I know I will win,” said one.

“You don’t need an argument to hate America,” says one, fiddling with his long beard. He says he has been fighting the Americans for five years. He claims to have seen American soldiers. He laughs when I ask if he’s killed them, and says he has confiscated their weapons.

“As long as I am alive, I am going back again and again.” Inshallah, he says. God willing. “When I look at history, I know I will win.”

The Border

The dusty road between Quetta and the Afghan border crossing at Chaman runs through the Baluch desert. The landscape is beautiful, lunar, with red rocks and high cliffs.

There are nearly 1,000 border posts placed strategically along the 1,500-mile Afghan-Pakistani border, with curfews and fences in key areas. But on the ground you can see how easy it is for Taliban fighters or leaders to slip in and out.

Located on a flat expanse of road, Chaman is crowded with people passing through the two arches of the three-stories-high brick “friendship gates.” The sign over one arch reads: proud pakistani. The second features the slogan pakistan first. Nearby is a biometric system for checking the identities of travelers crossing the border, but no one has used it for a while—perhaps a year, depending on whom you talk to. Blank computer screens and forgotten record books are covered in dust. The Pakistani officials at the border say the Afghan government refused to let them use the system, which had been installed by the Pakistani Ministry of the Interior.

To make a point about how impossible their job is, the border guards lead me up a narrow spiral staircase to the top of an observation tower, where I can see Afghanistan 40 feet below. Strangely, the tower windows are all shattered. Why is that? I ask, and the embarrassed Pishin Scout from the Frontier Corps (company motto: “Death before disgrace”) says that Afghans on the other side threw rocks when the biometric system was installed.

Below us, travelers cross into Pakistan on foot, on bicycle, by broken-down car, thousands of them a day. They get a routine pat-down and show their documents. That’s all. “Well, we know all the Taliban commanders by their faces,” one guard reassures me. There is also a list of suspected jihadists. But the border post is closed at sunset and reopened in the morning. At night, there is no official presence.

Later, someone else tells me that if I returned after hours I would not believe what I would see circumventing the border’s not particularly imposing barriers: opium, fighters, weapons.

The Good News, Such as It Is

I move on to Karachi. Home to 20 million people—including 2 million Pashtuns—Karachi is the biggest city in Pakistan and among the world’s most populous. It’s a maze, a giant slum, a perfect place for terrorists to hide. This is the city where Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and killed, and as I look out over the skyline stretching toward the shimmering Arabian Sea, Karachi’s enormity makes it readily apparent how easy it is to find refuge here, and how hard the job is for the people trying to catch people who don’t want to be caught.

But now, for a change, comes a small bit of good news:

In an undercover-police headquarters in the run-down neighborhood of Jamshed Town, a group of men in dingy shalwar kameezes (traditional pajama-like trousers and tunics) carry a cheap plastic suitcase into a back room. Gently, they set it on a desk next to a colonial-era typewriter covered in dust. This is an elite anti-terrorist squad, part of the Special Investigation Unit that deals with high-profile kidnappings, ransoms, and terrorism, but the men look more like street vendors selling orange juice, and the suitcase looks like the standard version favored by tourists at Heathrow and La Guardia. It’s bluish-gray, embossed with the words japan express. On the other side, ironically, is written bon voyage—ironic, since the suitcase belonged to a cell of a jihadist group called Jandullah, or Army of Allah, and if its owners had taken the voyage they wanted to, they would have gone straight to paradise.

The agents open the suitcase. Inside are the fixings for several suicide-bomb vests, including RDX, a military-grade plastic explosive. (The explosives are not connected to batteries. Had they been, they could have exploded. When I try to touch the RDX the detectives warn me that if I get traces on my hands I won’t be able to get through airport security.) It took the detectives here three years to crack this cell, one among dozens in Karachi, using human intelligence, tracking cell phones, conducting constant surveillance of the jihadists’ movements—in and out of the city, and in and out of the Tribal Areas. The jihadists were operating in small, independent cells, usually working out of cities such as Karachi or Peshawar but taking orders from commanders in towns in the tribal belt such as Wana, where the leaders were free to move outside Pakistani law.

The detectives are proud they broke up the cell, capturing three men, including a major figure called Qasim Turi, and killing four. These men took instructions from a leading figure in Wana, and their plan, according to papers found by the police, was to attack Pakistani targets connected with lawyers, judges, military officials, Jews (including, oddly enough, Lions and Rotary clubs), and Westerners in general.

The police operation took place at the end of January in a ghetto in East Karachi called Shah Latif Town and lasted four hours, the cops wearing old flak jackets and using ordinary, non-armored vehicles and Kalashnikovs. They had a tip from a local intelligence officer that the jihadists were getting ready to flee to Wana, where they would be out of the reach of the law. Detective Ejaz Ahmed Butt, a chubby, amiable man who had spent four years intercepting phone calls and tracing cell-phone numbers late into the night, was not ready to let them get away.

“It was a long, long assignment—a long hunt,” he says now, sipping sweet green tea in his grimy office. “I looked in other cities for them. I took my time.”

The afternoon of the raid, the jihadists had the strategic advantage of higher ground. They were housed with their families—three women and their children, including a three-day-old baby—in a high building; from the rooftop they rained down rockets and grenades on the cops. But the police had more ammo, and in the end they captured the house, coming away with the handcuffed terrorists and a cache of weapons and training material.

The Japan Express suitcase itself provides the most clues. Aside from the RDX, it contains a tumble of orange wires, ball bearings, and a homemade vest designed to carry nine kilograms of explosives. Everything a suicide bomber needs.

The room is silent as the men untangle the wires carefully, warning me not to touch. Everyone is somber, thinking of the same thing: the chaos, the blood, the shreds of flesh that would have resulted had this suitcase done its job. There have been nine suicide bombings in Karachi alone since 2002, and the last one, an attack on a convoy for Benazir Bhutto two months prior to her assassination, killed more than 140 people and wounded more than 500.

A special anti-terrorist unit in Karachi unpacks a suitcase filled with the makings for suicide-bomb vests, including military-grade explosives.

From the same raid that turned up the suitcase, the detectives retrieved five more vests, a barrel of hand grenades, rocket launchers, 10 rocket-propelled grenades, and a total of 26 kilograms of explosives. The cops are unsure where the jihadists got the latter from. One of my Pakistani colleagues later asks an undercover policeman about it, and he replies, “We don’t know where the supply line of explosives comes from. It’s military quality, so it could have been stolen from the American military in Afghanistan, or it could be given to them by compromised members of the Pakistani Army.”

Later, when the suitcase is closed, we sit by Butt’s desk and watch a DVD of the raid, then another DVD he confiscated, this one of the would-be bombers cheerfully putting together a suicide vest. They are masked, but their hands are quick and skilled; they have done this before.

The Faces of Evil

‘Terrorism is a virus,” says Saud Ahmed Mirza, the weary deputy inspector general of the Karachi Crime Investigation Division (C.I.D.), when I meet him the next day. “It doesn’t go away easily. It’s the long haul.” And Karachi, a mini-Pakistan with its melting pot of ethnic and tribal blends, is a fuse. Since 2001, Mirza says, he has seen the emergence of four new jihadist groups in this city.

Saud Ahmed Mirza, the deputy inspector general of the Karachi Crime Investigation Division.

We are sitting in his colonial-era office, with whitewashed doors and dark wood furniture. Mirza, a tall, elegant man with a penchant for early 1960s Italian films, has just shown me photos of the capture of another jihadist cell in Karachi, this one from the Islamic Movement of the Army of Mohammed. He explains that these men supply walkie-talkies and weapons to Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Taliban in Pakistan. Mirza has also captured three separate groups near Lyari Town, the oldest part of Karachi, a kind of no-man’s-land where smugglers, junkies, terrorists, and general bad guys roam freely.

A white-coated servant brings tea and biscuits to Mirza’s office and places the service on a table next to a sealed package with instructions written on it in Urdu. Mirza explains that it contains more confiscated RDX—25 kilograms in total. Then he somberly hands me a large police spreadsheet detailing the nine suicide bombings in Karachi: date, time, number killed, number wounded, identification of suicide bomber and party affiliation, names of those arrested and those still wanted. There are quite a few men in the latter column.

Beside the names of the bombers there are ghoulish photographs of their stitched-together heads, which were reassembled after they blew themselves up. For identification purposes, a surgical team put ears and noses and chins back together, as in a grisly version of Mr. Potato Head. Sometimes body parts were put in the wrong places. The names of the bombers’ affiliations are new to me.

“Al-Qaeda is just a brand name,” Mirza says, sipping his tea, listing the dozens of cells operating, explaining where they take their money and instructions from.

“It’s all murky,” he admits. We stare at the photos silently. This is what evil looks like.

On my last day in Pakistan we drive to Lyari Town, the Karachi slum that makes Gaza City look charming. I see an orange jumpsuit hanging from a window—a symbol of someone’s resistance, or someone’s anger, or maybe just a souvenir from a relative fresh out of Guantánamo.

It is clear the division between moderate and radical Muslims inside Pakistan is widening. On one hand, you have ordinary Pakistani people trying to live, trying to cope with the rising cost of flour, but also dealing with the constant fear, or terror, of the weekly—sometimes more frequent—bombs, which can explode anywhere, anytime.

On the other hand, the terrorism virus, as Mirza called it, continues to grow and flourish in Pakistan. It is fed not only by disenfranchised Pakistani youth and by those resenting the fact that their country appears to be aiding the West in the war against terror, but by foreign Muslims who can pass easily in and out of Pakistan to train and regroup. It’s a heady, potent blend of danger.

That evening, looking down on the lights of the sprawling city as my plane takes off from Karachi, I remember what a mullah in Peshawar told me at the start of my trip. “Pakistan is part of the world,” he said. “If the world is peaceful, we are peaceful. If the world is not peaceful, we will not be peaceful.”